The mandates that are and the massive tax increase that isn't

In February 2009, President Obama delivered what Steve Benen rightly described as the largest two-year tax cut in American history. Nevertheless, the New York Times asked in the run-up to the 2010 midterms, "What if a president cut Americans' income taxes by $116 billion and nobody noticed?" What happened, of course, was the Democrats' drubbing that November.

Now Republicans are hoping to repeat history this fall, this time by pretending that the Affordable Care Act upheld by the Supreme Court Thursday is a "massive tax increase" on American families. As it turns out, the penalty for failing to obtain health insurance beginning in 2014 will impact four million people, or less than two percent of the U.S. population. To put that figure in context, 40 times as many Americans pay the mandated taxes for the very popular Social Security and Medicare programs.